Blind Five Year Old

It’s not your imagination. Google’s rate of search innovation has accelerated. Google has marched through shopping Onebox enhancements (9/14), expanded forum listings (9/14), anchor based jump to and site links (9/25), Search Options expansion (10/1), Quick View PDFs (10/7), Twitter integration (10/21) and Social Search (10/26).

You could even include ancillary search innovations like Sidewiki (9/23) and fetch as Googlebot (10/12).

It’s been so fast that Google launched a series of weekly blog posts (This Week in Search) to keep up with the changes.

Pent Up Search Innovation?

For the past few years Google has stated in numerous venues that they didn’t particularly want to grow their share of the search market. They explained that extending their market share lead could incur the wrath of government oversight or create user backlash.

The jaded in the audience rolled their eyes and even the purists probably furrowed their brow. Sure, it makes a bit of sense but … really?

Yet, the timing of these recent search innovations is intriguing.

Bing Allows Google To Innovate

Microsoft’s latest dedication to search could be the reason for Google’s recent spate of search enhancements. Before Bing went live Google rolled out rich snippets, making Google last to the rich listings party. The preemptive move secured a certain search parity in the space.

That box checked off, Google sat back and watched as Bing innovated, advertised and finally partnered with Yahoo. Bing’s share began to inch up toward 10% and that seemed to be enough for the search behemoth to release the hounds engineers.

One gets the impression that projects that had once been stashed in a drawer were suddenly taken out, dusted off and quickly deployed.

What else does Google have in store for us?

This morning Microsoft announced a 10 year search partnership with Yahoo!

In simple terms, Microsoft will now power Yahoo! search while Yahoo! will become the exclusive worldwide relationship sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers.

But it’s not all simple and straight-forward. If Bing now powers Yahoo! search, what happens to Yahoo! Paid Inclusion?

What is Paid Inclusion?

Yahoo! Paid Inclusion is a pay-per-click product that allows an advertiser to pay for a listing in the search index. That’s right, you can pay to look like an ‘organic’ listing. Paid Inclusion is the dirty little secret that nobody at Yahoo! talks about and is only whispered about among advertisers.

Will Yahoo! Paid Inclusion Survive?

At first glance it might seem that Paid Inclusion will go the way of the dodo bird. Or will it? The second key term provides an opening.

Microsoft will acquire an exclusive 10 year license to Yahoo!’s core search technologies, and Microsoft will have the ability to integrate Yahoo! search technologies into its existing web search platforms;

While this statement is clearly about the Yahoo! search algorithm and (perhaps) ancillary products like SearchMonkey, it could also apply to Paid Inclusion.

The reach of Yahoo’s Paid Inclusion product has never been clear and, therefore, the actual revenue Paid Inclusion generates is also a bit of a mystery. Is Paid Inclusion revenue big enough to preserve through this partnership or not?

Paid Inclusion and SEO

Paid Inclusion already obscures Yahoo! SEO. If Paid Inclusion goes away, many advertisers who were getting traffic ahead of natural listings will suddenly be at the mercy of natural SERP and SEO. There could be a substantial traffic impact for these advertisers who have come to rely on a certain amount of traffic at a predictable ROI.

Should Paid Inclusion not survive the partnership, SEO – Bing SEO specifically – will become more important. If Paid Inclusion does survive, does it do so just on Yahoo! properties or would it be integrated into Bing results as well? If it is the latter, Paid Inclusion becomes much bigger.

In the final analysis, I don’t think Paid Inclusion revenue is large enough, can’t see Bing integrating Paid Inclusion and similarly can’t see Microsoft wanting to explain why searches on Yahoo! and Bing are materially different.

For these reasons I’m guessing that Paid Inclusion will be terminated.

UPDATE (July 30, 2009)

Danny Sullivan was able to land a question during the Yahoo! press conference.

I asked what happens to other things search like at Yahoo? What powered Yahoo News? What happens to the Yahoo Directory? Is Delicious search? And what happens to Yahoo paid inclusion?

Bartz: We have full flexibility on what to do within our own sites. Paid inclusion, we’ll decide on that later.

So Paid Inclusion still has a chance of surviving but it seems like it’s on life support.

Bling Search Engine

Since the launch of Microsoft’s Bing I’ve received traffic from ‘bling’ keywords: bling search engine, bling paid search, bling search real time.

Search is funny that way. A small misspelling by the user is matched to a variant of my blog name. The one letter difference between blind and bling seems big to a person but doesn’t amount to much for a search engine. It’s yet another example of my blind five year old theory on search engines.

I don’t know, maybe they should have named it Bling.

Bling is catchy and has an established vernacular. They could have used all sorts of celebrity endorsements about needing to find their bling. I can see the tag line.

“Search for your Bling!”